Why start with Google AdWords

A lot of people have been asking me recently why I’m such a fan of Google AdWords. They want to know if they should use Yellow Pages, or Sensis, big search engines like Yahoo! or little ones like Kanoodle.

My answer is almost always to start with AdWords. Why? Because I’m a huge fan of the 80/20 rule.

Start with the 20% of effort that will give you 80% of the result. Then, once you’ve cracked Google & found what works there, by all means take your results to the other advertising options.

Below is a fairly typical shot from a client’s analytics report…

It shows the traffic coming to their site from people searching. Now admittedly Yellow Pages isn’t in this report (it’s under referring sites report) but that showed a grand total of 26 for the same time period

Now again, bear in mind that this site hasn’t been optimized, but it’s in a fairly small niche, with little competition. But still, there’s about 30x the traffic coming from Google as there is from msn & 45x the traffic than from yahoo!

Of course, I could prattle on about how much easier to use AdWords is, how much faster you can test your headline, offer, price, even domain name or how well it works with Google Analytics… but I won’t. Suffice to say – just try it for your business (or blog!). Run a small test, with a low budget & see what happens.